It is not the truth that makes you free. - Richard Lewontin (italics in the original) - 'Billions and Billions of Demons', The New York Review of Books online January 9, 1997. how little it takes to tamper with our beliefs, how readily we are led, how easy it is to fool the public when people are lonely and starved for something to believe in. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated “just so” stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent." Sagan seems baffled, and nowhere does he offer a coherent explanation of the popularity at the supermarket checkout counter of the Weekly World News, with its faked photographs of Martians. Conscientious and wholly admirable popularizers of science like Carl Sagan use both rhetoric and expertise to form the mind of masses because they believe, like the Evangelist John, that the truth shall make you free. Perhaps we ought to add to the menu of Saganic demonology, just after spoon-bending, ten-second seat-of-the-pants explanations of social realities. From his early Mismeasure of Man,1 which examined how the political and social prejudices of prominent scientists have molded what those scientists claimed to be the facts of human anatomy and intelligence, to his recent collection of essays, Eight Little Piggies,2 which despite its subtitle, Reflections on Natural History, is a set of reflections on the intellectual history of Natural History, Gould’s deep preoccupation is with how knowledge, rather than the organism, is constructed. Nevertheless, if the exhortation is to succeed, then the argument for the superiority of science and its method must be convincing, and not merely convincing, but must accord with its own demands. Treatments for cancer remain today what they were before molecular biology was ever thought of: cut it out, burn it out, or poison it. ↩, I.S. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? The reason that people do not have a correct view of nature is not that they are ignorant of this or that fact about the material world, but that they look to the wrong sources in their attempt to understand. Repeatable observations that do not fit into an existing frame have a way of disappearing from view, and the experiments that produced them are not revisited. Our task was to take the affirmative side in a debate: “Resolved, That the Theory of Evolution is proved as is the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun.” One of our opponents in the debate was a professor of biology from a fundamentalist college in Texas (his father was the president of the college) who had quite deliberately chosen the notoriously evolutionist Department of Zoology of the University of Texas as the source of his Ph.D. — Richard C. Lewontin. Who am I to believe about quantum physics if not Steven Weinberg, or about the solar system if not Carl Sagan? What is involved here is the difference between explanation and intervention. It is a cliché of intellectual history that Newton attempted to accommodate God by postulating Him as the Prime Mover Who, having established the mechanical laws and set the whole universe in motion, withdrew from further intervention, leaving it to people like Newton to reveal His plan. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/01/09/billions-and-billions-of-demons His repeated demonstrations that organisms can only be understood as historically contingent, underdetermined Rube Goldberg devices are meant to tell us more about the evolution of human knowledge than of human anatomy. Another post discusses some great passages knocking Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and the science … The Mismeasure of Man (Norton, 1978). Third, it is said that there is no place for an argument from authority in science. Our dilemma is that we do not know how to provide that power. Nobody is more transparent or candid about his commitment than Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin: “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. Billions and Billions of Demons: Richard Lewontin reviews The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent." He understood that a defect of his system of mechanics was the lack of any equilibrating force that would return the solar system to its regular set of orbits if there were any slight perturbation. For Carl it was a struggle between ignorance and knowledge, although it is not clear to me what he made of the unimpeachable scientific credentials of our opponent, except perhaps to see him as an example of the Devil quoting scripture. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter mystifying to the uninitiated. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, “What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and Biology as Ideology, and the co-author of The Dialectical Biologist (with Richard Levins) and Not in Our Genes (with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin). ↩, Plato, Gorgias, translated by Walter Hamilton (Penguin, 1960), pp. ↩, For an illuminating history of this period, see James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest 1895-1943 (Louisiana State University Press, 1978). Nor are they the only manufacturers of knowledge who cannot be bothered to pick up a return package when the product turns out to be faulty. On the one hand science is urged on us as a model of rational deduction from publicly verifiable facts, freed from the tyranny of unreasoning authority. Explanations of phenomena can be given at many levels, some of which can lead to successful manipulation of the world and some not. Article / Editorial and Opinion Jan 13, 2014. Richard Lewontin. I have quoted from this review in several posts in the past: One post contains the "divine foot in the door" quote that is in what I call "The Darwinian Fundamentalist Manifesto." This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. Second, to put a correct view of the universe into people’s heads we must first get an incorrect view out. Scientists apparently do not realize that the repeated promises of benefits yet to come, with no likelihood that those promises will be fulfilled, can only produce a widespread cynicism about the claims for the scientific method. Science & ‘The Demon-Haunted World’: An Exchange. When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn’t even get Dallas. ), The Radicalisation of Science, Macmillan, 1976, p. Carl Sagan, like his Canadian counterpart David Suzuki, has devoted extraordinary energy to bringing science to a mass public. While Gould has occasionally been enlisted in the fight to protect the teaching and dissemination of the knowledge of evolution against creationist political forces, he is primarily concerned with what the nature of organisms, living and dead, can reveal about the social construction of scientific knowledge. Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. The book is not meant to be a discourse on method, but it is in large part a collection of articles taken from Parade magazine and other popular publications. It is not simply, as Sherlock Holmes thought, that the brain is like an empty attic with limited storage capacity, so that the accumulated clutter of false or useless bits of knowledge must be cleared out in a grand intellectual tag sale to make space for more useful objects. In the end we must trust the experts and they, in turn, exploit their authority as experts and their rhetorical skills to secure our attention and our belief in things that we do not really understand. The revealing rhetoric of this publicity is always the same; only the blanks need to be filled in: “It was announced today by scientists at [Harvard, Vanderbilt, Stanford] Medical School that a gene responsible for [some, many, a common form of] [schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, arterio-sclerosis, prostate cancer] has beenlocated and its DNA sequence determined. Lewontin, Richard watch video, Adnan Oktars comments and opinions about Lewontin, Richard, watch related articles, videos, interviews and documentries for Lewontin, Richard… The vast majority of us do not have control of the intellectual apparatus needed to explain manifest reality in material terms, so in place of scientific (i.e., correct material) explanations, we substitute demons. If the judge, attorneys, and jury could reason out the technical issues from fundamentals, there would be no need of experts. Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. I doubt that an all-seeing God would fall for Pascal’s Wager, but the sensibilities of modern believers may indeed be spared by this Clintonesque moderation. Second, it is repeatedly said that science is intolerant of theories without data and assertions without adequate evidence. If, on the other hand, I were neutral, and didn't already have an "a priori adherence" to a particular worldview (be it naturalistic or otherwise), the question "does God really exist?" Billions and Billions of Demons from the January 9, 1997 issue To the Editors : Richard Lewontin’s review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World [ NYR , January 9] raises many of the right questions about the over-confident rhetoric of many scientists. The mutual exclusion of the material and the demonic has not been true of all cultures and all times. They can be captured, imprisoned, and even killed by someone with superior magic.6 In our own intellectual history, the definitive displacement of divine powers by purely material causes has been a relatively recent changeover, and that icon of modern science, Newton, was at the cusp. 28, 32. First, we are told that science “delivers the goods.” It certainly has, sometimes, but it has often failed when we need it most. 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